The proliferation of personal computing devices in recent years, especially mobile personal computing devices, combined with a growth in the number of widely-used communications formats (e.g., text, voice, video, image) and protocols (e.g., SMTP, IMAP/POP, SMS/MMS, MPP, etc.) has led to a communications experience that many users find fragmented and difficult to search for relevant information in. Users desire a system that will provide searching across different data object types, across multiple formats and protocols, with ease and accuracy.
With current communications and searching technologies, different types of messages and other different types of data objects tend to be “siloed” within particular formats or protocols, causing users to be unable to search uniformly across multiple communications and other data objects in multiple formats or protocols, across multiple applications and across multiple other computing devices from their computing devices to find relevant search results. This can be time consuming, inefficient and frustrating. For example, a user may have to search for emails in an email system, and search for a video file in a different location. Moreover, due to the passage of time, the user may be unaware that a topic searched with regard to one data object type (e.g., emails) might have yielded relevant results if a different type (e.g., image files) had been searched.
Furthermore, with searching technologies, searching methods tend to be uniform—“one size fits all”—regardless of the preferences and individual characteristics of the person who is doing the searching.
The subject matter of the present disclosure is directed to overcoming, or at least reducing the effects of, one or more of the problems set forth above. To address these and other issues, techniques that enable seamless, multi-format, multi-protocol storage, searching and retrieval are described herein.